The Memoirs of Field-Marshal Wilhelm Keitel

by Walter Gorlitz

  As they drove off together to the doctor in Ulm, Rommel swallowed the poison and died. The real cause of death was concealed, on Hitler’s express wish, and Rommel received a state funeral with full military honours.

  It is of interest to consider the preliminary interrogation of Field-Marshal Keitel by the American Colonel Amen, published in Nazi Conspiracy and Aggression, Supplement B, p. 1256 et seq. In this painfully thorough interrogation, one thing which the American officer obviously completely failed to grasp becomes very plain, unfamiliar as he would have been with the Prussian Code of Honour: the field-marshal’s actions were based solely on the normal consequences any German officer (and especially a senior one) must draw upon the failure of an attempt at an action based—in Keitel’s view—upon dishonourable motives; every opportunity must be given to the German officer to choose this way out. During his interrogation he expressed his unlimited admiration of Rommel’s military achievements and courage, and he obviously considered poison in this case a better means of suicide than the traditional bullet in the head, because he feared a gigantic scandal—not so much for the Third Reich as for Rommel and the officer corps—if Field-Marshal Rommel’s suicide or, alternatively, his being sentenced to death by the People’s Court became common knowledge. Hence the—for the Americans—incomprehensible attitude displayed by Keitel.

  8

  The Last Days under Adolf Hitler

  1945

  As one of the few people to have survived the events of April 1945 both within and without the Reich Chancellery, I would like to relate some of my recollections, beginning with those of 20th April, Hitler’s last birthday.

  Berlin and the city’s eastern suburbs were already under sporadic long-range gun fire from small-calibre Russian artillery; a few enemy bombers and spotter planes had been wheeling over the eastern end of the city, particularly at and shortly after dusk, but they kept a respectful distance between themselves and our antiaircraft batteries on the flak towers, which in addition to acting as anti-aircraft defences were engaging the Russian long-range batteries with accurate gunfire and repeatedly silencing them. Fighting had already reached the outermost suburbs of east Berlin, as General Busse’s Ninth Army had been routed near Frankfurt-on-Oder and Küstrin, and our defence of the Oder had collapsed.

  The Chief of the High Command [i.e. Keitel himself] and his Chief of operations staff [Jodl] and their immediate lieutenants were still working in the command post which had been built in Dahlem’s Föhrenweg by War Minister von Blomberg back in 1936, while the OKW operations staff which had relinquished its nearby quarters at the Air Zone Command building in Kronprinzallee, had moved in [with the Army General Staff] to the War Office’s bunker at Wunsdorf (in Zossen). It was there too that Jodl and I had our emergency billets, I myself being billeted at Number 16 Föhrenweg, the former home of the champion boxer Schmeling.

  Towards midday of 20th April, the British and American air forces executed their last massive air raid on the centre of Berlin, the governmental quarter. Together with my wife, Grand-Admiral Dönitz and his wife, and our adjutants, we watched this violent and horrible spectacle from a small mound in the garden of the Grand-Admiral’s service quarters: he had returned to Berlin the night before from Coral, his operational headquarters near Eberswalde, as it was now threatened by the Russians’ advance.

  During this final heavy bombardment in perfect and sunny weather the already badly afflicted Reich Chancellery building escaped further damage; our own fighter squadrons did nothing to beat off the attack on Berlin, and the anti-aircraft defences were powerless against an enemy attacking from such a height. The raid lasted almost two hours, the bombers parading overhead in tight formation as though it were a peacetime air display, dropping the bombs in perfect unison.

  A war conference had been laid on from four o’clock onwards that afternoon in the Führer’s bunker at the Reich Chancellery. As Jodl and I entered the bunker, we saw the Führer accompanied by Goebbels and Himmler going up to the Reich Chancellery’s day-rooms; I rejected an adjutant’s suggestion that I should tag along with them, as I had not yet had the opportunity of greeting the Führer. I learned that a number of boys of the Hitler Youth had been paraded upstairs in the Reich Chancellery to receive decorations for gallantry, including several Iron Crosses, for their superb work in A.R.P. and anti-aircraft units during the enemy air raids.

  After the Führer had returned to the bunker, Göring, Dönitz, Keitel and Jodl were individually summoned to his small sitting room next to the conference chamber to congratulate him on the occasion of his birthday. All the other people taking part in the conference were greeted by the Führer with just a handshake as he entered the chamber, and no further attention was paid to its being his birthday.

  When I found myself alone face to face with the Führer, I found myself unable to congratulate him: I said something to the effect that both his merciful escape from assassination on 20th July and his continued survival until today, his birthday, to maintain in his hands the supreme command at this grave moment when the very existence of the Reich he had created was threatened as never before, inspired in us the confidence that he would draw what seemed the inevitable conclusion now: I said that I believed he should begin surrender negotiations before the Reich capital itself became a battlefield.

  I was about to continue in this vein when he stopped me with the words: ‘Keitel, I know what I want; I am going to go down fighting, either in or outside Berlin.’ To me that sounded like an empty slogan, and he could see I was trying to dissuade him from the idea; he held out his hand to me, and said: ‘Thank you—call in Jodl, will you. We will speak later about it.’ I was dismissed from his room. What he discussed with Jodl I never learned.

  The war conference took its usual course in the oppressive confines of the bunker chamber; the War Office’s General Krebs described the situation on the eastern front, and Jodl the remaining theatres. In the meantime, Göring and I withdrew to the private rooms and discussed his intention to evacuate his operational headquarters to Berchtesgaden, as Karinhall was already in grave danger and Kurfürst, the Air Force operations staff’s headquarters, was already being cut off from time to time from the signals networks. Göring was planning to go by car, in which case it was high time for him to leave, as between Halle and Leipzig there was only one main road south known to be clear of enemy spearheads. I advised Göring to go, and he asked me if I would suggest to Hitler that the Air Force operational headquarters should be transferred to Berchtesgaden.

  Despite the critical situation—in the Italian theatre—the war conference passed calmly and without the otherwise frequent unbalanced outbursts. The Führer made a number of clear and objective decisions; his excitability was well in rein. When I put forward the proposal that Göring should be despatched to the south before the communications were severed altogether, he agreed and went so far as to suggest this himself to Göring.

  My motive in doing this centred admittedly on my own absolutely firm belief at that time that the Führer and the OKW operations staff would—as had been provided for in our orders—also be transferring their supreme command to Berchtesgaden, even if not until the situation in the fighting around Berlin was consolidated; if necessary they would have to flee by air and at night. The aircraft for this were already standing by, and everybody not absolutely vital to the Führer’s headquarters in Berlin had already been sent off to Berchtesgaden by special trains and convoys of lorries. The same went for the OKW and the War Office, which had both been split up and resolved into a joint Northern Command Staff (for Dönitz) and a Southern one, at Berchtesgaden. Dönitz was to assume command of all branches of the armed forces in northern Germany as soon as central and southern Germany were cut off from the north by the linking-up of the American and Russian troops to the south of Berlin. Hitler himself had signed the orders for this, as he himself planned to take over in the south while remaining in radio communication with Dönitz.

  On our return
to Dahlem, on 20th April, I informed Jodl of my decision to fly out to Berchtesgaden everybody with whose services we could possibly dispense; my own special train had already moved there two days earlier. With my adjutant Szymonski in command, my private aircraft made a pefect daylight take-off in the hands of Air-Staff Engineer Funk [Keitel’s pilot] and a full crew, taking General Winter, Dr. Lehmann, Frau Jodl and my wife to Prague where a service car was waiting to take them on to Berchtesgaden. The plane was back at Berlin-Tempelhof and at my disposal again that evening. All this was done to ease the pressure and prepare the way for the imminent migration of the Führer’s headquarters to Berchtesgaden, a move which at that time was beyond any question.

  On 21st April, General Schörner, commander of the biggest and strongest Army Group on the Eastern Front [Army Group Centre] operating from down in the Carpathians to almost as far as just south of Frankfurt-on-Oder, arrived to make a personal report on the situation to the Führer. They met in complete privacy, and as Jodl and I entered the Führer’s bunker that afternoon Schörner was just taking leave of him. It was obvious that the Führer had been greatly encouraged by their talk, for he uttered a few optimistic remarks which Schörner echoed, and then invited us to congratulate Germany’s latest ‘Field-Marshal’.

  As the war conference progressed, it became very obvious that Schörner had imbued the Führer with an exaggerated confidence in his own front and leadership, and that Hitler was now clutching at this like a drowning man at a straw, despite the fact that in the final synthesis it was only a limited section of the front that was putting up any show of resistance. Things were getting hopeless in the west and in Italy; the Russians were at the gates of Berlin. . . . The Führer’s mood brightened still further as, unexpectedly for us, General Wenck, commanding the newly-formed Twelfth Army, put in an appearance during the conference to brief Hitler on the position of his divisions, and on his operational intentions and the timetable for his surprise attack on the American formations operating in the Harz region and advancing on the Elbe. As General Wenck has survived and is in American captivity, I will leave it to him to describe what were his aims, intentions and prospects at some date in the future; I myself have no charts or papers to refer to. The Führer particularly valued Wenck as the energetic but cautious staff officer for which he had come to know him; he had been the closest colleague of the Chief of General Staff, Guderian, and his right-hand man and permanent representative, and he had been hand-picked by the Führer for the command of the newly-raised Twelfth Army. This latter would, it was hoped, bring about a change in the position between the mountains of central Germany and the Elbe, by mopping up the enemy forces—believed to be only weak—in the Magdeburg-Lüneberg-Brunswick area and joining up with the armoured group which had crossed the Elbe south of Lauenburg and which was fighting in the vicinity of Uelzen.

  In view of the improvised nature of his formation, the complexity of the situation, which was tying down our forces on every hand, and the numerical weakness of the army in question, I was unable to comprehend either the Führer’s optimism or that of General Wenck. I am convinced that Wenck did not honestly hope to gain more than a local success, and certainly not a strategic victory. But in this case too the Führer’s manifest self-deception was only increased by the generals in whom he had trusted and this in turn inspired hopes in him which were to prove fateful to us. Only people who—like me—have seen and heard the hundreds of cases where even senior commanders did not dare to stand up to the Führer at times like this and tell him what they thought and what they considered feasible, have any right to reject the accusation of ‘feebleness’ among the Führer’s closest advisers.

  As Jodl and I drove back together in my car that evening after the war conference, as was our custom, we both expressed our amazement that the Führer had seemed so optimistic, or at least had been able to talk so confidently. Schörner and Wenck must have infused him with this new spirit. Could it really be that he did not see how hopeless our position was? No, he must have seen it, but he refused to admit it could be true.

  At our usual time on the afternoon of 22nd April, we went to the war conference. I saw at once that leaden clouds lay heavily over the atmosphere; the Führer’s face was yellowish-grey and he was of stony countenance. He was extremely nervous, his mind kept wandering and twice he left the conference chamber for his private room next door. In our absence, the situation on the eastern front and the acute worsening of the position round Berlin had been outlined at midday by General Krebs, who had taken General Wenck’s place as representative of Guderian, Chief of the General Staff, who had been sent on permanent leave some weeks before.

  Not only was there street-fighting in the eastern suburbs of Berlin now, but as a result of the rout of the Ninth Army to the south, the Russians had already reached the Jüterbog area, and the Army’s biggest and most important central munitions dump was thus in grave and immediate danger; we had to be prepared to write it off. There was also increasing enemy pressure on the northern outskirts of Berlin, although on both flanks of Eberswalde Colonel-General Heinrici’s Oder front still stood fast. Jodl and I learned of this worsening of our position in the battle of Berlin only at the Reich Chancellery. The commandant of Berlin had received personal orders from the Führer that midday for the the safeguarding of the Inner City and the government quarter.

  Jodl kept the war conference as short as possible. Army Group West [i.e. the formations under the C.-in-C. West, Field-Marshal Kesselring] had in southern Germany already been pushed back into the Harz from Thüringia, there was fighting in Weimar, Gotha, Schweinfurt, and so on; in northern Germany they had been pushed back to the Elbe and the region south of Hamburg.

  At the end of the conference, I asked for an interview with the Führer accompanied only by Jodl. A decision could not be postponed any longer: before Berlin became a battle-ground of house-to-house street-fighting, we had either to offer to surrender or to escape by flying out to Berchtesgaden at night to commence surrender negotiations from there. I had the conference chamber cleared, and found myself alone with Hitler, as Jodl had just been summoned to the telephone. As so often in my life, Hitler cut me short after my very first few words and broke in to say: ‘I know already what you’re going to tell me: “the decision has got to be taken now!” I already have taken a decision: I will never leave Berlin again; I will defend the city with my dying breath. Either I direct the battle for the Reich capital—if Wenck can keep the Americans off my back and throw them back over the Elbe—or I will go down with my troops in Berlin, fighting for the symbol of the Reich!’

  I told him bluntly that that was madness, and that in the present situation I was obliged to demand that he fly that very night to Berchtesgaden to ensure the continuity of command over the Reich and the Armed Forces, something that could not be guaranteed in Berlin where communications might be severed at any moment.

  The Führer explained: ‘There is nothing to stop you flying to Berchtesgaden at once. In fact I order you to do so. But I myself am going to stay in Berlin. I have already announced that to the German people and the Reich capital on the radio an hour ago. I am not in the position to retract.’

  At that moment, Jodl came in. In his presence, I explained that I had no intention whatsoever of flying to Berchtesgaden without him, Hitler; that was quite out of the question. It was not just a matter of the defence or loss of Berlin, but of the command of all the armed forces on every front, which could not be guaranteed from the Reich Chancellery if the situation in the capital worsened any more. Jodl fervently agreed, and explained that if their signals communications with the south were to break down altogether—and the big cable had already been cut in the Thüringian Forest—then there would be no further possibility of directing the operations of the Army Groups of Schörner [Centre], Rendulic [South], the Balkans [north-west Croatia], Italy [south-west (C), under Colonel-General von Vietinghoff-Scheel] or West [Field-Marshal Kesselring]; radio communication alone would
not suffice. The split-command organisation would have to be put into effect at once and the Führer would have, as planned, to fly to Berchtesgaden to remain in command.

  The Führer called in Bormann, and he repeated to the three of us the order to fly to Berchtesgaden that night, where I was to take command, with Göring as his personal representative. All three of us announced that we refused to do so. I said: ‘In seven years I have never refused to execute an order from you, but this is one order I shall never carry out. You cannot and should not leave the Armed Forces in the lurch, still less at a time like this.’ He replied: ‘I am stopping here, and that is that. I have deliberately announced this without your knowledge so as to commit myself. If there has got to be any negotiating with the enemy—as there has now—then Göring is better at that than I am. Either I fight and win the battle of Berlin—or I am killed in Berlin. That is my final and irrevocable decision.’

  I saw it was useless to continue this argument with Hitler in his present mood, and I announced I would drive at once from the Reich Chancellery to the front to see General Wenck, cancel all the orders covering his operations, and direct him to march on Berlin and join up with the Ninth Army units fighting to the south of the city. I would report to him, the Führer, at noon next day on the new position and on Wenck’s movements, and then we should be able to look ahead from there. The Führer at once agreed to my proposal; obviously, it brought him a degree of deliverance from the frankly horrifying position in which he had put both himself and us.